School Turnaround Efforts: What's Been Tried, Why Those Efforts Failed, and What to Do Now

Autor/in	Backstrom, Brian
Institution	Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government
Titel	School Turnaround Efforts: What's Been Tried, Why Those Efforts Failed, and What to Do Now
Quelle	(2019), (56 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Monographie
Schlagwörter	School Turnaround; School Effectiveness; Program Effectiveness; Failure; Educational Improvement; Criteria; Transformational Leadership; State Action; Models; Best Practices; Massachusetts; Tennessee; New York; Florida; Illinois (Chicago) + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Schuleffizienz; Teaching improvement; Unterrichtsentwicklung; Staatliche Intervention; Analogiemodell; Master-Studiengang
Abstract	Over the past half-century, billions of dollars have been spent across the nation on efforts to transform low-performing public schools -- most of them urban, most of them low-income, and most of them disproportionately enrolled with students of color -- into models of success. It hasn't worked. The failure of attempts to remedy the state of urban public education across the nation has led some reformers to call for a sweeping closure of low-performing schools. Often, however, school closures have been carried out without first assuring that each displaced child has a better choice of school available, and sometimes such policies have resulted in students actually being relegated to worse-performing schools than they were previously attending. While a tremendous amount of taxpayer and private philanthropic money has been spent on attempts to transform failing schools into something better, the vast majority of these attempts have failed because they lacked three criteria fundamental for the program to be a success: (1) A school turnaround program must provide flexibility to meet the individual challenges at schools; (2) strong individual school leadership -- and the freedom for that strong leader to act -- is key; and (3) real and lasting school transformation requires a steady commitment to bold changes in the face of a political and bureaucratic establishment that typically favors the "status quo." This report: (1) explores the history of federal and philanthropic school turnaround efforts; (2) summarizes the state school-takeover movement; (3) highlights initiatives in Massachusetts and Tennessee that came to be used as school-transformation models and examines where those efforts are now; (4) spotlights takeover efforts in New York State; (5) offers a recipe for how to successfully transform persistently failing schools; and (6) presents a couple of examples -- one school in Florida and a district-wide effort in Chicago -- where this recipe was followed and everything comes together just right to make education better for students. (ERIC).
Anmerkungen	Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. 411 State Street, Albany, NY 12203-1003. Tel: 518-445-4150; Web site: https://rockinst.org/
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01